In the South Sea Islands they have for contagious diseases a horror as great as your horror of crime. A man or woman stricken with a loathsome disease, such as smallpox, is seized, isolated, and the individual sores of the smallpox patient are earnestly scraped with sea shells--until the patient dies. It hurts the patient a good deal--without ever curing, of course--but it relieves the feelings of the outraged good ones who wield the sea shells. You kind-hearted creatures, hunting "crime" in great cities, are like the South Sea Islanders in their treatment of smallpox. You ardently wield your reforming sea shells and you scrape very earnestly at the sores so well developed. ---- No desire here to decry your earnest efforts. But if you ever get tired of scraping with sea shells, try vaccination, or, better still, try to take such care of youth, to give such chances and education to the young, as will save them from the least profitable of all careers--CRIME. ---- Rich good men, nice bishops, comfortable, benevolent ladies--every man and woman on Blackwell's Island, every wretched creature living near a "red light," would gladly change places with any of you. Scrape away with your sea shells, but try also to give a few more and a few better chances in youth to those whom you now hunt as criminals in their mature years. God creates boys and girls, anxious to live decently. YOUR SOCIAL SYSTEM makes criminals and fills jails. THE WONDERFUL MAGNET HOW WILD SUPERSTITION SETTLES DOWN INTO SCIENTIFIC REALITY Everybody knows something of the peculiarities of the magnet. As a boy you led tiny painted ducks around the water basin, holding a magnet in your hand, or you owned a horseshoe magnet that would pick up nails and needles. You know now in a general kind of way that the magnet is a very useful as well as a somewhat mysterious thing. The old Greeks and Romans simply knew that some remarkable iron ore found in Lydia, near the town of Magnesia, and hence called magnet, was capable of drawing and holding pieces of metal. The ancients had the wildest theories concerning the magnet, just as we have wild theories about things that are new and strange to us to-day. They thought that the magnet could be used in cases of sickness, that it could attract wood and flesh, that it influenced the human brain, causing melancholy. They believed that the power of a magnet could be destroyed by rubbing garlic on it, and that power brought back again by dipping the magnet in goat's blood. They believed that a magnet could be used to detect bad conduct in a woman; they believed that it would not attract iron in the presence of a diamond. They believed much other nonsense quite as ridiculous as the nonsense that we believe to-day. ----